Behringer Neutron Analog Semi-Modular Synth Coming In April For $299

Behringer today announced details for their new Neutron analog semi-modular synthesizer.

The Behringer Neutron is a semi-modular synthesizer that can be used standalone, or as part of a Eurorack system. It features features VCO’s based on the classic Curtis 3340 chip design, a new ‘Moffat’ filter design (created by design engineer Keith Moffat) and an extensive patch bay that lets you override the default signal flow.

I’m not a fan of Behringer due to years of experience with poorly-made products, and am no longer a customer of theirs, but this synth looks great; an excellent feature set, a wealth of patch points, VCOs and even analogue envelopes! I know many, many people with have great fun making music with this (when it ships…)

I get you. Also owned one piece of gear by Behringer which I would have put in fire and thrown out of the window if no-one would have bought it. But all things after the period of X32 I’ve heard is being great. I at least have changed my opinion about their newer products. Don’t really think they’re any worse than other gear – pretty sure that they’re lightyears ahead of Numark in terms of quality. And Uli has a mission and it’s not just making money, it’s making gear affordable for people who don’t have much. It’s a great mission in my opinion.

Lots of weird comments here. A fully analogue 2 Osc synth with a really extensive patchbay (which obviously allows for self-patching, Mr Itchy) and a newly developed filter for an unprecedentedly low price, what’s not to like? Just because it says Behringer on the panel? Couple of years ago the synth world would have killed for something like this! Personally, I hate the pseudo futuristic font, and the color, well… But the concept seems great and I like what I hear in the demos.

It’s interesting that people are comparing the Neutron’s price with devices like the Mother 32, O-Coast and the new Pittsburgh synth. While it will have an impact on sales of those devices, I think the real impact is going to be felt in the modular world.

We’ve reached a point where the market is flooded with hundreds of eurorack modules – many quite similar. The good ones tend to cost $250-$400 and you should expect to pay $1500-$2000 to build a reasonably versatile starter system. It’s expensive stuff.

Behringer is short-circuiting that process for a new generation of synthesists. Suddenly, we can have everything we need to start patching and using modular gear at a tiny fraction of the cost. It will be interesting to see where this leads.

Totally agree with this. I’ve been holding off getting into Eurorack because the entry point is just too expensive. The introduction of the rack brute is such a cost effective way to get started that I’m in. And my first modules will most probably be from smaller manufacturers.

I really can`t understand the hype with the Rackbrute. When i heard the name after the MB 2 videos surfaced i thought “yeah! at last. A minibrute divided in eurorack exchangeable modular parts!”. First thing i would do is change the oscilator and i would be rollin! only to find out that the “Rackbrute” is just a case with power supply. I mean it looks cool and all but i don`t see why it`s so “cost effective” i mean , aren`t there other “low cost cases” out there already? There are many, ranging from 180 (low cost Doepfer case) till 400 euros so i don`t see how the rackbrute brings something revolutionary price wise. Only the fact that it looks good and matches the new Brutes…. The Neutron is cost effective. The Rackbrute i fail to see why it`s such an affordable way into modular but i am open to examples as i really am no expert in Modular..

Btw the price of the Neutron,, some say it`s very Cheap and also “Cheap”.
To me this is more close to reality of how much an analog synth actually cost`s to build in 2018.

I don`t understand how some people justify some prices of 2.000, 3.000, 5.000 apart from feeling their balls reinforced by the feeling of “boutique high end”

However, the first price I saw on the Arturia 6U case (on CDM) was down in the $1.58 per HP range.

My own slap-it-together effort came to about $1.40 per HP — desktop rack stand, Z-rails and Z-ears, a cheap 4HP power module and brick, one bus board and some flying bus cables. It’s not portable or sturdy though; if I were to put it in an ATA mixer case that’d raise it to about the Doepfer LC9 level of cost.

Mantis is a pretty good case, but it’s ugly in an early 90’s desktop PC sort of way. And I find I often have to remove 2 or 3 modules on the top row to access the busboard to plug in a module on either the top or bottom rows. And everybody wants a lid or hard case for the thing for travel.

Though i see you know your math, the way you present this info does not help me much. I stopped reading after 2-3 lines to be honest. Too much information. So whats your conclusion from all that? Is the Rackbrute “a cheap entry into modular” or is it pretty average price wise ? Am asking because i still don’t get why people present it as super cheap. It looks pretty normal price to me. My feeling is that if i build a basic modular into the small Rackbrute version i am at 1000-1200 euros easy. If i am wrong of course i am more than open for a different point of view

I got that much. Thing is,, imagine you are talking to a dumb person (me) and want to give a simple example. “If you fill up the Rackbrute with modules you save X amount of money compared to a filling the rack case from Developer X” . Not per Hp but how much will a Ready to use system will cost with the same modules installed ? At the end you save 50 euros to the next Case? Thats what i mean.

Uh… Try for a minute to imagine you don’t know much about modular (as you would know that i don’t know much about modular if you had read my not so complicated comment above) and can’t instantaneously visualise-imagine HP lists and Numbers and then let me know if you find the comment not confusing. It`s like i go to a mechanic and ask him about his opinion on cars. Example : “is a vw golf a good value for money compared to a bmw 1? ” and he starts to make a list of how much value per Kilogramm i get for each car. Duh…. ! 🙂

One of the reasons it’s difficult to make “cost comparisons” in the world of Eurorack modular, is that each and every single user will make different choices about which modules they purchase, and the cost for those modules varies widely. So for the musician whose primary concern is “getting in” and keeping cost down, there might be a very basic, not-that-great-sounding combination of two oscillators, a filter, a VCA and some LFOs and utility (scaling, inverting) modules for CVs that would roughly match the Neutron. That simple setup in Euro could certainly be more expensive than the Behringer. Another musician might be more discerning about sound quality or timbre, and choose a more advanced module for each of those basic building blocks, which could be MUCH more expensive than the Neutron.

This is precisely the appeal of modular synths, that you can configure the instrument that works best for your needs. So to follow through with your car analogy, it’s not a Golf to BMW comparison; you might have a car with the styling of the BMW, but a Golf engine, Suzuki tires, headlights from a Ford Pinto and custom aftermarket mudflaps – your mechanic will say “I’ve never seen anything like this, how can I compare?”, which is part of the modular appeal.

There really is no useful apples-to-apples comparison in Eurorack modular, since the whole point is that each instrument is custom for each musician. So, for myself, I’ve built an instrument with great capabilities and very high sound quality, that can do much, much more than the $300 Neutron, however the outlay over the years has been close to $7000. This has nothing to do with my balls (which feel pretty much the same to me as they did before I built this instrument) but everything to do with the choices I made, module by module, about features and sound. While it’s an expensive instrument, I use it professionally and the cost is justified by the end results. Another part of what I find appealing about this landscape is that professionals can exist alongside hobbyists or “up-and-comers” who don’t have those kinds of resources, and we can learn from each other.

I hear ya man.
It`s not that serious to me. Don’t take everything i say 100% seriously… 🙂
I am just wondering how people say the Rackbrute is a cheap way into modular, when
there are similar cases ans if you put the same modules in these two cases (rack brute vs rack X) you will save some 30-50-60 euros. This is what i don’t quite get. The Rackbrute as i see has 88 TE space and costs 260 euros. A Doepfer A 100 Lc6 case has 2×84 Te and costs 300. I fail to see how it will be substantially cheaper to “fill” the Rackbrute with modules compared to putting the same modules you need to fill the Rackbrute in a module for 300 euros. So basically you save 40 euros? This is what i mean. Off course i might be wrong cause its not my area of expertise but i hope you know what i mean.

I think it’s great to see that Behringer has manufactured at least a dozen Neutrons. I’m looking forward to seeing those units reviewed by SonicState, BoBeats, Cuckoo, and others on YouTube.

If there are thousands of other Neutrons coming off the assembly lines behind those, then that’s awesome and it means Behringer has made great strides in getting their supply chain together faster. I want to get a Neutron in April! I’ll just believe it when I see it.

Right or wrong this marks the point that Euro goes from being stuff built by cottage homegrown builders and a few employees – a community, to being outsourced in some big factory somewhere. On the plus side, cheaper of course. More people can get it into it, etc. The negative side…you get the picture. It had to happen at some point.

Moog made Eurorack the new standard for synth modules, with the Mother-32.

With Behring coming out with cheap synths in this form factor and companies like Radikal doing the same thing at the high end, it looks like synth modules may make a comeback.

I’d love to see Waldorf retarget their Eurorack keyboard as a mass-market product. If somebody could to this, and pair a great keyboard with a good power supply and space for Euro modules that actually keeps the cables away from the keyboard, they could have a huge winner. With the number of Behringer D synths on back order, there’s a huge market for this.

Remember Doepfer Dark Energy? That was the first one I think which you could get either as a module or as a Eurorack format.

That Waldorf Eurorack keyboard is simply too expensive and not their core business. Fatar may come with something like that, maybe by their Studiologic brand. Up till now it’s the Keystep you see everywhere.

people need to understand that these are actually MIDAS products with a solid quality. Forget the behringer prejudice. I have a D already and its super good. Remember when people talked bad about the nord lead when it came out “because there is almost nothing inside”, it became a popular and most versatile seller! Same thing here…this is the future

“people need to understand that these are actually MIDAS products with a solid quality. Forget the behringer prejudice. ”

The Behringer D may be designed by engineers that used to work at MIDAS, but it’s engineered to be a Minimoog knockoff that can be mass-produced cheaply in China.

I’ve tried the Behringer D and thought it sounded pretty good – but it looks like garbage and feels spectacularly cheesy. There’s a reason Minimoogs have never had knobs and switches as tiny as the Behringer D’s – it’s just fiddly, and it’s impossible to dial in a sound as precisely as you can with a real Minimoog.

Not sure how you can compare this or the Behringer D to a Nord Lead. The electronics inside most synths are a tiny fraction of their cost. So the reason that Behringer’s synth modules are as cheap as they are is that they’ve shrunk the interface and used cheap components, and the reason that the Nord is expensive is that they’ve used full-size everything and high-quality components. Shipping alone on the Neutron or Behringer D is probably $10 vs closer to $200 for something like a Nord Lead.

i hate the idea of this thing, but it looks reasonably well designed. Hopefully it brings more people into eurorack instead of just taking money away from all the small businesses that have made it such an innovative and fun format. You just can’t hit that price point without extreme scale and the cheapest of manufacturing processes.

The Radikal Delta and the Pittsburgh Modular Microvolt looked a lot more interesting, for anybody that’s got the additional $$’s.

But I think a lot of people may end up getting both. Why not?mEven the ’boutique’ Euro synth modules are damn affordable compared to the prices of buying a bunch of individual modules, and they all offer a lot of unique capabilities.

It may not be pretty, but look at Doepfer! I’d never get anything from them just because of what they look like (ok maybe not the dark series, but probably everything else). They don’t really look like lab equipment, but they totally lack emotion – you know, the thing which music is made of!

I doubt that anyone has an issue with the synth itself and it’s certainly something I will personally check out when I get the chance.

That said, Behringer fully deserving of their reputation as a shoddy manufacturer and it should not be surprising that people treat any new product from them as being suspect until proven otherwise. Their quality control is reflected in the prices they charge. Historically their gear has been generally unreliable enough that it is not worth paying anything for. You might luck out and get a good one but most likely not.

If I still cared about making music…and more importantly if anyone cared for the music I cared about making, I would be interested in this. It is like a Mopho KYBD without the keyboard and nested one knob menus…but, my gear sits idle waiting to be liquidated…I am uninspired, broken and thinking about leaving music making behind for good.